Notes on what’s happening to our ability to collectively know things, and a look ahead to what this community is especially well positioned to do to support and revitalize our info ecosystems and the humans inside them.

I had the privilege of discussing Blacksky and AT Protocol at several different college campuses, conference venues and other settings along with webinars and doing user research. I plan to share those learnings to help others build better products and how we particularly plan to incorporate those learnings from both a product and operations standpoint.

Traditional social platforms centralize control of community spaces—the platform owns your group, your members, and your data. On ATProto, ownership, governance, and moderation become explicit design decisions. This talk explores building shared resources on a decentralized protocol—from data synchronization to governance models—drawing from real experience building community features and examples from other ATProto apps.

Protocol architectures are governance structures. Their design choices allocate power, and what they leave unsaid gets filled by economics. This talk traces what happens when an open protocol's reach layer goes ungoverned, from SMTP to algorithmic convergence to why kpop fandoms are structurally destined to dominate engagement-driven systems.